Some patients with advanced lung cancer benefit from immunotherapy, even after the disease has progressed as evaluated by standard criteria, according to research presented by Artal-Cortes et al at the 2017 European Lung Cancer Conference (ELCC, Abstract 96PD). The findings pave the way for certain ...
White blood cell counts may predict whether patients with lung cancer will benefit from immunotherapy, according to research presented by Tiseo et al at the 2017 European Lung Cancer Conference (ELCC, Abstract 30PD). “Immune checkpoint inhibitors such as nivolumab [Opdivo] and...
Osimertinib (Tagrisso) improved cancer-related symptoms in patients with advanced lung cancer, according to an analysis of patient-reported outcomes from the AURA3 phase III clinical trial presented by Lee et al at the 2017 European Lung Cancer Conference (ELCC, Abstract 85O). “With my...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Chen et al, the phase II KEYNOTE-087 trial has shown that the programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1)–inhibitor pembrolizumab (Keytruda) is highly active in patients with relapsed or refractory classical Hodgkin lymphoma. Findings in the study ...
Findings comparing the mutational landscape in pregnant and nonpregnant patients with breast cancer that sought to define whether the disease may have a different biology in pregnant women were reported by Loibl et al at the 2017 IMPAKT Breast Cancer Conference, held in Brussels (Abstract...
As reported by Katherine S. Virgo, PhD, MBA, of Emory University, and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, ASCO has issued a provisional clinical opinion on second-line hormonal therapy for chemotherapy-naive castration-resistant prostate cancer. The provisional clinical opinion applies...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Kurian et al, surveys in a population-based sample of patients recently diagnosed with breast cancer indicate that many undergo genetic risk testing without seeing a genetics counselor and that many with BRCA1/2 variants of uncertain significance...
Winner of the Journal of Neuro-Oncology Award sponsored by Kluwer Academic Publishers, Doris Du Wang, MD, PhD, a resident in the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), presented her research on seizure outcome after surgical resection of insular...
According to a study reported by Hamada et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, postdiagnosis aspirin use was associated with improved survival vs nonuse among patients with colorectal cancer who have lower, but not higher, tumor levels of CD274 (programmed cell death 1 ligand 1; PD-L1). Study...
In a phase III trial (NRG Oncology/Gynecologic Oncology Group GOG-0213 trial) reported in The Lancet Oncology, Coleman et al found evidence of an overall survival advantage with the addition of bevacizumab (Avastin) to paclitaxel-carboplatin in recurrent platinum-sensitive ovarian cancer. The...
In a study reported in JAMA, Ali H. Mokdad, PhD, and colleagues from the University of Washington, Seattle, found that cancer mortality rates in the United States dropped from 240.2 to 192.0 per 100,000 population between 1980 and 2014.1 Mortality rates varied widely among U.S. counties for...
In a separate interview, George Ansstas, MD, a medical neuro-oncologist at Siteman Cancer Center, Washington University, St. Louis, discussed his experience in treating patients with tumor-treating fields. He has treated about 35 patients with glioblastoma in the first-line setting and 20 with...
Using a novel approach called tumor-treating fields—which involves the delivery of low-intensity electric fields to the brain by a patient-operated device—along with standard-of-care temozolomide therapy improved overall survival and progression-free survival vs temozolomide alone in patients with...
The investigational cyclin D–dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6 inhibitor abemaciclib was recently evaluated in several solid tumor types in a phase I multicenter trial.1 Given primarily as a single agent and with continuous dosing, abemaciclib showed encouraging early signals of clinical activity not only ...
Geoffrey I. Shapiro, MD, PhD, Director of the Early Drug Development Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, explained the current research initiatives involving cyclin D–dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6 inhibitors. Mechanism of Action How do CDK4/6 inhibitors work at the cellular level in...
The robust progression-free survival benefits achieved with the use of the CDK4/6 inhibitors palbociclib or ribociclib in the metastatic setting provided the impetus to study these agents in early-stage breast cancer. Adjuvant studies are underway, but they take time to mature. For evaluating...
The novel mechanism of action of drugs that inhibit the cyclin D–dependent kinases CDK4 and CDK6 has prompted effective new treatment strategies. Although the bulk of the data supporting the use of selective CDK4/6 inhibitors is currently in breast cancer, patients with other tumor types are...
This CE/CME/CEU-accredited supplement is jointly provided by To earn credit/contact hours, you must read all the articles in this supplement and then go to: https://education.annenberg.net/cdk46inhibition Release date: May 10, 2017 Expiration date: May 10, 2018Annenberg Center for Health...
In a study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Jamal-Hanjani et al found that early stage non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) tumors were characterized by widespread intratumor genomic heterogeneity and that increased subclonal copy-number alterations in this context were...
Higher costs for complex cancer surgery may be an indicator of worse—rather than better—quality of care, according to new research by experts at Rice University and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Their findings are published by Ho et al in Surgery, and provide...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Mark G. Kris, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and colleagues, ASCO and Cancer Care Ontario (CCO) have issued an update to the ASCO/CCO clinical practice guideline on adjuvant systemic therapy and adjuvant radiation therapy for stage...
A propensity score analysis in a prospectively maintained database at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) has shown that use of perioperative hepatic arterial infusion pump chemotherapy after complete resection of colorectal liver metastases is associated with a marked improvement in...
Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to durvalumab (Imfinzi) for the treatment of patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma who have disease progression during or following platinum-containing chemotherapy or who have disease...
Mayo Clinic researchers have discovered that surgery could more than double life expectancy for many patients with late-stage kidney cancer, giving them anywhere from 2 to almost 10 years more than they would have without the surgery. A paper published by Zaid et al in The Journal of Urology found...
Nivolumab (Opdivo) has been found to produce durable responses in patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma, in the phase I/II CheckMate 040 trial. These findings were reported in The Lancet by El-Khoueiry et al. Study Details The phase I/II dose-escalation and dose-expansion trial was...
In the international phase III REMARC trial reported by Thieblemont et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, lenalidomide (Revlimid) maintenance was found to prolong progression-free survival vs placebo in older patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma responding to first-line R-CHOP...
On April 28, 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to brigatinib (Alunbrig) for the treatment of patients with metastatic anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who have had disease progression on or are...
Although the duration and magnitude of clinical response are unpredictable in patients with ALK-rearranged non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with crizotinib (Xalkori), eventually all patients develop resistance to the drug. A study by Pailler et al evaluating whether circulating...
Although cancer immunotherapy can produce dramatic responses, only a minority of patients benefit from such therapy. Being able to differentiate treated responders from nonresponders early in the course of therapy would help to triage nonresponding patients away from ineffective therapies, reducing ...
A randomized trial, reported by Maly et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, has shown that having an individualized survivorship care plan in place was associated with increased physician implementation of recommended breast cancer survivorship care among low-income, predominantly Latina breast ...
A UK phase II trial comparing pazopanib (Votrient) with paclitaxel after failure of platinum-based therapy in patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma was stopped early due to futility. These results were reported by Jones et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Two...
Second cancers in children as well as adolescents and young adults (AYAs) are far deadlier than they are in older adults and may partially account for the relatively poor outcomes of cancer patients aged 15 to 39 years overall, according to a new study by University of California (UC), Davis...
A new laboratory technique developed by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and other institutions can rapidly test the effectiveness of treatments for life-threatening breast cancer metastases in bone. Findings of this research were published by Wang et al in Nature Communications....
In newly updated clinical guidelines from the Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO), researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, along with an interdisciplinary team of colleagues at The University of Texas MD Anderson...
In an analysis reported in the Journal of Oncology Practice, Isenberg et al sought to determine the maximum possible costs for an inpatient palliative care unit to be considered cost-effective. Although the palliative care unit was not cost-effective on the basis of variable costs, it was cost...
On April 25, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) posted warning letters addressed to 14 U.S.-based companies illegally selling more than 65 products that fraudulently claim to prevent, diagnose, treat, or cure cancer. The products are marketed and sold without FDA approval, most commonly on ...
Results of the SARAH trial presented at the 2017 International Liver Congress (ILC) demonstrated that selective internal radiation therapy (SIRT) resulted in a median overall survival of 8.0 months compared to 9.9 months with sorafenib (Nexavar; P = .179) in patients with locally advanced ...
A Japanese phase III trial has shown no survival benefit of prophylactic cranial irradiation vs observation in patients with extensive-disease small cell lung cancer who had any response to platinum-based doublet chemotherapy and no brain metastases at baseline. These findings were reported in The...
The latest in a series of studies led by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine shows that addition of a widely available, noninvasive imaging test called 99mTc-sestamibi SPECT/CT (single-photon emission computed tomography plus computed tomography) to conventional CT or magnetic resonance imaging...
Oncology community professionals are concerned about the ability of their patients to access cancer screening and treatment under the proposed American Health Care Act (AHCA), according to a survey conducted March 23–24, 2017, at the National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) 22nd ...
A pathologic complete response to presurgical therapy occurs in between 40% and 50% of patients with HER2-positive and triple-negative breast cancer, raising the question of the need for surgery for all patients after neoadjuvant chemotherapy indicates a pathologic complete response in...
Women enrolled in California's Medicaid program (Medi-Cal) who have been diagnosed with severe mental illness have been screened for cervical cancer at much lower rates than other women, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), published by...
New research indicates that testing for variants in seven cancer-associated genes (instead of the usual process of testing in just two genes) followed by risk-reduction management could cost-effectively improve life expectancy for women at risk of hereditary breast cancer. The findings were...
As reported by Chandran et al in The Lancet Oncology, a single-center study has shown that adoptive transfer of autologous tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes produces tumor responses in metastatic uveal melanoma. Study Details The study involved 21 consecutive patients treated at the Surgery Branch...
Nevus Vasculaire Albumen Print, Paris, 1869 Published in 1869, Revue Photographique des Hôpitaux de Paris was the world’s first medical journal to contain real photographs. In the seven issues produced between 1869 and 1875, 245 images were used. Dr. A. de Montméja, a Parisian ophthalmologist and...
The 21-gene recurrence score assay, Oncotype DX, determines a score that estimates the likelihood of distant recurrence of disease in women with early-stage estrogen receptor–positive breast cancer; this score is used to assess the benefit of adjuvant chemotherapy. Testing with this assay is...
An ASCO clinical practice guideline update, reported by Khorana et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, includes the recommendation of gemcitabine-capecitabine doublet therapy as an adjuvant therapy option in potentially curable pancreatic cancer. The updated recommendation (4.1) modifies the...
Chemotherapy-associated cognitive dysfunction, often referred to as “chemobrain” or “chemofog,” is a common occurrence during active cancer treatment and may continue after treatment is completed. However, since treatment other than chemotherapy, including radiation therapy, surgery, and hormonal...
An article that appeared in the April 10 issue of The ASCO Post (“Olaparib Maintenance Prolongs Progression-Free Survival in Ovarian Cancer”) suggests unwarranted conclusions from the phase III SOLO2 trial of olaparib (Lynparza) in patients with platinum-sensitive relapsed ovarian cancer and...
In an Italian phase III trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Marcello Tiseo, MD, of Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria, Parma, Italy, and colleagues found that adding first-line bevacizumab (Avastin) to cisplatin/etoposide did not prolong overall survival in patients with...